Things aren’t what they appear to be in Azzue’s family compound on the beach
in Annadale.

A crystalline 10-inch acrobat on the dining room table isn’t glass but
acrylic. The tabletop is genuine piedra dura (semi-precious stone inlay),
but the female figures — his design — that hold the 1000-lb. slab are a
reinforced composite.

He’s developed procedures that permit contemporary materials like fiberglass
to simulate white marble. His art trades in illusion, unlike his previous work —
buildings.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, if people knew the name of any local architect, it was
Charlie Azzue.

No one else in the borough was building such noticeably modern structures.
His Physicians and Surgeons Building — dual parallel swoops of reinforced white
stucco on Victory Boulevard opposite Clove Lakes Park — still looks new after
nearly 40 years.

Azzue built similarly striking private homes, his own included, on Todt Hill
and Grymes Hill. He figures he’s done 50 buildings on the Island. The largest
and busiest are on the campus of Staten Island University Hospital.

He’s proudest of the Pedestrian Bridge, linking several sections of the
hospital. At a cost of $1 million, his design cost $2 million less than versions
the estimates submitted by competing architects.

Azzue has given some thought to money. His "Currency Series" is a family of
satirical, life-sized humanoid figures whose paper skin is all legal tender,
enlarged. The artist even took a few to Wall Street last year just for fun.

"We were mobbed," he said. "Everybody wanted to see them."

CONTINUING EDUCATION

Azzue the architect semi-retired five years ago at 65. If someone calls
looking to build a building, he’ll consider it.

Still, he’s very happy as is.

"The first morning I didn’t have to go to work, I felt like a million
dollars," said Azzue, adding that he’s still working, but these days "work"
means sculpture or studying sculpture, or some sort of design project.

It’s not as if he needed the money or the work. "I don’t think I’m making
anything on this," he said. "Maybe there will be $200 left when its finished."

Azzue isn’t planning to start a theatrical design studio. "You know what
happens," he said. "You have friends; they called and asked me to help."

He has the means and the time to study classical sculpture in situ (on site). He’s spent a lot of time in Rome. He and his wife
lived there for three years after their marriage in 1960.

The Rome connection is memorialized on the wide pocket doors of the family
dining room, where Azzue reproduced the electrifying hook-up of Michelangelo’s
Sistine ceiling fresco: God and Adam, fingertip to fingertip. When the doors are
closed, contact occurs.

Last year he explored Aphrodisia in Turkey, an important center of Hellenic
sculpture. He also took his wife, children and grandchildren to Egypt several
months ago.

"Incredible!" he said, pulling out his cell phone to show visitors some
Egyptian sights. "A sculptor would be working in relief, just one-eighth of an
inch deep, nothing really, and make perfectly rounded figures."

This interest in figurative imagery isn’t new. Forty years ago Azzue turned
archetypal imagery — an Egyptian ankh, a blooming lotus, a Stone Age
spearchucker, Zeus wielding a thunderbolt — into a frieze-like panel on one of
the Todt Hill houses.

A while back, having installed his 16-foot-tall acrobat group outside the
office building on Victory Boulevard, it was clear that the architecture and the
sculpture are compatible.

His white fiberglass acrobats and dancers are as harmoniously proportioned as
classical sculptures. Although they aren’t stone, they are sturdy. He’s had them
outdoors in all kinds of weather. They are apparently impervious.

If he were few decades younger (and retired) he might be working in marble,
he concedes, but it would be a complicated situation: "I would need 15
assistants."

Azzue is still refining the surface of "An," although she looks fine. She’s
important. He’s thinking of her as a goal. "I think the ballerina is almost
there."